It wasn’t I who discovered the body. I want to make that perfectly clear, if only for the benefit of a couple of club acquaintances of mine.

Ludovic Travers, special investigator for Scotland Yard, commits murder? No—but at the end of this novel you will understand why he might claim to have done so.

Sir William Pelle has become a missing person, and Superintendent Wharton of the Yard is prioritizing his recovery. But when Pelle is found murdered, there are serious questions to answer. Was the well-to-do jewellery-handler the victim of a well-planned robbery? And why was the corpse partly covered in sugar?

Several of the enigmatic figures formerly surrounding the deceased are going to repay close scrutiny; as is the importance of the army corporal who keeps weaving in and out of the story. It will take all Travers’s customary acuity to bring the case to a successful conclusion—and eventually to explain his assertion of committing murder himself.

The Case of the Corporal’s Leave was originally published in 1945. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.